Recently, I was sent a New Yorker article with the eye-catching title “This Is Your Priest on Drugs.” The article reports the findings of a study in which “spiritually hungering” religious leaders from a diverse array of religious institutions were invited to take the hallucinogenic compound psilocybin to test how effective psychedelically induced “religious experiences” could be in rejuvenating participants’ sense of spiritual well-being. Unsurprisingly, the article explores with hopeful curiosity the drug’s therapeutic potential. Yet its potential is not constrained to merely enkindling a new flame in flagging spiritual lives. Rather, as one of the researchers and an avowed enthusiast of psychedelic medicine puts it, psylocibin has the broader power to inject “new life” into institutional religions suffering from waning popular interest. It has the power, the researcher implies, to make available to all and sundry those immediate experiences of God that were once the special province of mystics, unshackling common folk from the bonds of stale doctrine and placing in their hands the freedom to encounter the divine whenever they should please.

The article details the study’s tenuous case for drug-assisted spiritual therapy using testimonies of the participants themselves. Of the admittedly small, self-selecting sample size – thirty religious leaders of a largely homogeneous demographic – 79 percent of participants who completed two sessions claimed the experience enriched subsequent experiences in their prayer, vocation, and awareness of the sacred in everyday life. Nearly every participant reported an intense and immediate encounter with God. These encounters are variously described as impressions of the feminine presence – soothing, maternal, and spiritually erotic. One Episcopalian pastor reports experiencing a “total deconstruction of patriarchal religion.” With such presumably desirable outcomes, how could we ever doubt psilocybin’s potential for meeting our unfulfilled spiritual needs?

Whatever you think of the study’s methodology and morals, one thing it brings into sharp relief is that our inborn desire to access the mystery of the sacred has not gone away. We yearn for the sacred to intrude once again into the mundanity of our lives. We want God to speak to us. We want him to make his being known and felt.

This ingrained thirst cannot simply be postulated as a by-product of the evolutionary process. It bears witness to the fact that we were made for communion with God in all his mystery. Nor is this thirst reducible to a desire for propositional, impersonal knowledge of God. Rather, it is a thirst for someone who is infinitely transcendent but also infinitely close, who has placed longing for himself at the center of human identity. We desire that God make himself known to us, that the mystery of who he is captivates the entirety of our hearts, imaginations, and wills. But we desire that this captivation be an authentic union – a communion – where God, in the freedom of who he is, chooses to give himself and make himself known. Like any authentic relationship, this self-revelation cannot be contrived or forced.

Freedom marks God’s insertion into history and into human lives. From his quiet self-revelation in the created order to the sudden and dramatic conversion of Saint Paul, the common denominator in God’s activity throughout history has always been his activity and our receptivity. We may search for him, but communion with him is marked first and foremost by his self-gift to us. “The heavens are telling the glory of God,” the psalmist sings, “And the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, there are no words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth” (Ps. 19:1–4). Here, what would today be described as a “religious experience” arises from the communication of a voiceless entity. The sky, the sun, the stars, and outer space are, on their own, eerily silent and impersonal. Yet their silence and impersonality are broken when the gift of faith opens our eyes to see creation not as a seething, random mass of atoms, but as replete with symbols that whisper the name of their Creator. “Open my eyes that I might see the wonders of your Law” (Ps. 119:18). Although the psalmist here prays for eyes to see the magnificence of the Torah rather than the created world, he expresses the same truth that God’s self-revelation to us is always gift; we cannot grant ourselves the eyes to see. Luke poignantly observes that Saul, struck blind on the road to Damascus, opened his eyes yet could see nothing until God removed the scales shrouding his sight through the hands of Ananias (Acts 9:1–19). Paul was never the author of his own conversion; he was only the recipient of the communion that sanctified his life.

Receptivity is not the same as passivity. Paul was not goaded against his will into a new way of seeing reality. He might well have chosen to spend the rest of his life resenting God for the loss of his sight instead of allowing himself to be molded so as to see God afresh. Just as God freely chooses to reveal himself, he leaves room for us to respond freely to his invitation to communion. A true communion of persons is always grounded in mutual freedom. And authentic communion demands the totality of the person. It demands the full engagement of the rational part of ourselves. God does not ask us to jettison our intellects in order to come to know something of him or to experience him intensely. Nor does it make sense that he should have us set aside that part of ourselves by which we choose: the rational capacities necessary for freedom. Because God’s interventions in our lives are always aimed at teaching our eyes how better to see him and our ears how better to hear his voice, Origen of Alexandria famously writes, our receptivity becomes an expression of our total freedom. The best students are the ones who are the most attentive, who throw the entirety of themselves into learning from their tutor. Perhaps this is why the most spiritually attuned souls in history endure the most acute hardships. Saint John of the Cross writes, “Vexation makes us to understand how the soul that is empty and disencumbered, as is necessary for his divine influence, is instructed by God in his divine wisdom, through this dark and arid night of contemplation … and this instruction God gave not in those first sweetnesses and joys” (Dark Night of the Soul, Book I, XII.4).

Since the acceptance of this invitation requires the totality of one’s mind, heart, and will, it would seem odd for God to reserve the truest and most intense experiences of union with him to instances where we must set aside the most foundational part of who we are. It would seems odd for him to set aside the quiet ways in which he communicates himself to the soul habituated in contemplation and instead offer the experience of his self-revelation in the effortless popping of a pill. It would seem odd for us to be the masters of when we see him. I do not think it helpful to question the sincerity with which the participants in the study reported their experiences. Nevertheless, whatever the psilocybin episode generated in them, it is difficult to see how it comes anywhere near true communion with God.